This Specialization is aimed at preparing students for undergraduate study in an English-speaking university. The course equips you for full participation and engagement with your studies by building awareness and understanding of the core values and expectations of academic culture, and providing you with practical strategies to apply to your studies.
In the Capstone Project, you will apply the academic knowledge and skills you have learnt throughout courses 1-4 to research, write and present a project proposal that addresses a complex, real-world problem related to your field of interest and/or future study. After completing this course, you will be able to:
1. Apply a range of idea generation techniques
2. Apply research strategies to search, collect, select, process, and cite information
3. Use the research process to develop and critically analyse ideas
4. Apply critical thinking skills to evaluate and analyse ideas and evidence
5. Use problem-solving skills to identify gaps in knowledge and define issues
6. Develop creative and innovative solutions to real-world problems
7. Use appropriate academic genres for written texts and multi-media presentations
8. Use written and oral skills to communicate ideas effectively for academic contexts

Lydia Dutcher

Jessica Blackburn

Текст видео

[MUSIC] Okay, so now that you have a final draft of your essay, you need to polish and refine it. In this lesson, we'll go through some strategies to ensure that your essay, and paragraph arguments, are structured well, and the ideas are clear, and then we'll briefly discuss how to write essay titles. In the next few lessons, we'll look more specifically at polishing, and refining reports, incorporating visual aids, and then finally, editing your text for language. We'll start by outlining some techniques you can use to check the overall structure of your argument in the essay. Firstly, you need to make sure that your essay answers the question. To do this, you should go back and read the question on your assignment sheet. It's important to look at the exact question that your lecturer has sent you to make sure that you are actually answering the right question. One way to do this is to read through your introduction and conclusion. In order to provide an example of this, we have used a question from the University of Sydney's ANHS1600 Foundations of Ancient Greece Course run by Dr. Benjamin Brown. The essay we will look at is an authentic student essay that was written for the course. It's on ancient Greek poetry and had a word limit of 1,500 words. The question we'll look at is, what are the different contexts in which poems given in the course reader were performed? What is the relationship between content and occasion? And should we interpret these pieces in this light? And here we can see the introduction and conclusion of the essay. Now, I'm going to check that this essay has answered the question by highlighting the four different parts of the question in different colors. Firstly, the question is about poems given in the course reader. Then, we have a question about their performance contexts. A question about the relationship between content and occasion. And finally, a broad question about interpretation. As we read through the introduction, we can see that certain sentences relate to each part. For example, the first and last sentences of the introduction are clear responses to the last question. Should we interpret the pieces in this line? The oldest position has made it very clear with words like must and cannot be ignored. Similarly, the poems given in the course reader are identified here as those by Sappho, Anacreon and Pindar. The context is identified as specific performance occasions, and Archaic Greek society and politics. And their relationship is indicated by the phrase heavily influenced in the introduction. In the conclusion, the phrase, I'm not bound by fact and can not be treated as such, relates to the relationship, as does the following sentence. The very last sentence in the conclusion again relates back to the last question and gives a definitive answer. As historians, it would be foolish to disregard the context these poems were performed in and the relationship between content and occasion. Thus, as you can see, the sentences in the introduction and conclusion directly respond to the question. The author has also addressed some of the possible limitations or considerations of her position in the conclusion as shown here. When you do this for your essay, ask yourself whether the current version of these two paragraphs give an appropriate answer, but addresses all of the issues raised by the question. Highlighting the different parts in different colors helps you to do this. This is relatively easy for this question because the original has already been broken down into three or four distinct sections. For essay prompts that are just a single question or a quote followed by an instruction, you'll need to look to your analysis of the question and highlight the aspects of your analysis that you have addressed. Once you've done this, it's also a good idea to go through your essay and highlight all of the topic sentences. You can re-read your essay question and then read your introduction. Each of the topic sentences you highlighted and your conclusion. This should give you a much more complete understanding of your response without getting distracted by the individual arguments in each paragraph. Another strategy is to use your marking or assessment rubric to mark your own assignment. Of course, you should be consulting this rubric all the way through planning, drafting, and finalizing your essay. The last check might show you certain points or arguments that you need to make clearer for your marker. Or it might point out something that you've forgotten to consider. Checking your marking or assessment rubric also includes double checking what your word or page limit is and ensuring that you fall within acceptable boundaries. As you can lose marks otherwise. Lastly, you can create a reverse outline. As you write, it's natural that your essay structure might change. A reverse outline means looking at your draft and writing an outline of what is in your essay, quickly summarizing what's in each paragraph. By doing so, you may see that certain ideas are overdeveloped or underdeveloped, or that some key ideas are entirely absent. These, then, are the areas to focus on. Consider the introduction from the essay again. From this introduction we can see that a plan for the essay might look like this. This sentence indicates that we would first have a paragraph on the social context of archaic Greece then a paragraph on the politics. This will be followed by separate paragraphs, analyzing the poultry of Cinder, and Anacreon and Pindar. In relation to how poultry was doubt with, in the society, how poet were treated. All the relationship between politics and poetry. This would then be followed by a conclusion that would reiterate the last statement of the introduction. A quick check of our essay reveals however that the paragraph on Sappho comes after Anacreon and Pindar. We, therefore, need to do a quick edit of the names so that the preview in the introduction matches the presentation of the information in the body of the essay. Now, you've checked your overall argument, you need to focus in on each of your individual points and paragraphs. Start by checking your coherence and cohesion. We worry to be discussed what this means. But it's important to do this after you finished your essay as well as you're writing it. One aspect to this you should focus on is your topic sentences. Firstly, make sure that you have them. They guide your reader and make sure that your idea is a well structured. Consider the following paragraph from the same essay. Feel free to pause the video and read it. As you can see this is a very long paragraph which should ring alarm bells. While you can have longer paragraphs in academic essays, this essay is only 1,500 words long, and, as such, this paragraph is much too long. So let's have a look at the different ideas that are dealt with in this essay, and see if we can break it down. The first sentence, highlighted in yellow, is directly related to the next three sentences as they all deal with the unknown context service, thus, we might want to separate a paragraph here, however, when we continue to read, we see that the next four sentences are all related. In fact, this whole section deals with the interpretability of Sappho's poetry. It can be considered one long paragraphs, with the topic sentence coming here at the end. Now, if we look with the remaining section of the text, we can see that it deals with the importance of interpreting the poems within the context. The first line is nearly seven to link the to two ideas. And in this case, is a useful way of guiding your audience through your arguments. The second sentence here, highlighted in blue, is actually the topic sentence. Once you've checked a paragraph structure, you then need to check your argumentation, this means you need to check that you have provided enough evidence for each of your claims. And that the evidence both supports your claim and it is credible. As you can see with this section, there's only one reference and no examples. In particular, the sentence highlighted here in yellow should have a reference. Who is debating whom? Where did the author get this information from? If this were your essay, you need to go back and double check your notes to find the reference. Similarly, you should be checking that your references are correct, and appropriate, for the style that you are required to use. Here, the author has placed the year and page number in brackets at the end of the sentence, but is otherwise using APA 6th style referencing. This is what it should look like instead. Another helpful hint is to see if you have a friend to swap essays with. This isn't always a good idea if you've written on the same topic for the same course. But if you've answered different questions or are in different courses, it can be a really good way to see if your argument flows clearly and answers the question, and makes sense to an outside reader at a similar education level. Now, before we go, I also want to address the issue of essay titles. Sometimes your essay title is, simply, the essay question, as it is with this one. Other times, you may need to think carefully about how you write your title. Effective essay titles are similar to though less complex than general articles. Vogan suggests that titles should be DEF, or declarative, engaging and focused. In other words, your title should say something about your topic and your argument should catch the readers attention and should be short and clear. In order to make sure that it says something about your topic, go back and look at your thesis statement and your main supporting argument and see if you can combine the ideas into a simple sentence. Then, when you have a sentence that summarizes your essay, try and make it shorter and clearer. Your essay title should not be a full sentence. Though unlike report titles, it can have verbs. Kulkami recommends using the active voice, meaning that your sentence should convey something doing something. This helps to engage your reader. Another tip for engaging your reader is to avoid using abbreviations and jargon. Moreover, you might think that a pun or joke is funny but often this doesn't translate to your audience so it's best to avoid those as well. I hope this quick guide helps you in polishing and refining your essays. Good luck! [MUSIC]